If you want most influential and most cited, any paper outlining a now commonplace procedure Or, if you want a break from the heavy stuff, try a not-influential and too-much-cited paper outlining a procedure that's been around for hundreds if not thousands of years: http://care.diabetesjournals.org...

Sounds like you want PIV . It requires seeding particles, and can be a bitch to get working properly. It needs to measure air and water outside in the field, so there's no possibility of preparing the medium in any way. Thank you for the link, though; looking around a little I was heartened by this...

Does anyone know if this exists or would be possible to build with any current means? An apparatus located at a certain place that can measure the velocity (vector) of the surrounding fluid at any arbitrary point (or a large grid of fixed points) around it, within a certain distance. It cannot just...

So, basically, if you want to increase the downwash, you increase the drag, and you increase the lift. Practically, you cannot do this forever. But even for small increases in downwash, either through airfoil shaping or geometric angle of attack changing, you increase both lift and drag. If you loo...

So I'm a sophomore and planning to take the AP test for history at the end of the school year and I'm a little troubled. are there any things that i should study in depth over, or should i just generalize myself to knowing as much about everything as is possible. also, anyone got some tips that wou...

Misconceptions about airfoils, in order of increasing sophistication: ⋅ Airfoils produce lift by Bernoulli's equation because the air has to travel faster over the top of the wing to cover the larger distance in the same time ⋅ Airfoil lift has nothing to do with the Bernoulli eq...

yurell wrote:Tested that as part of a project at school. AAA batteries are virtually dead after an hour, with Duracell beating Energiser, and some cheap Chinese crap actually outlasting them both by a long margin

This might have been from high internal resistance rather than high energy content.

If you had good research experience, you probably would have a shot at a "top-tier" school like MIT. Without research experience, it's very hard to say, because I don't know anyone who applied to grad schools with no research experience. If I had to guess, I'd say to make your "reach&...

A very robust light source can be created by just collecting a bunch of hydrogen atoms together. Make it roughly the right amount, and it burns for billions of years without maintenance. It will even withstand most disturbances that are likely the be encountered over such a time period. Isn't there...

I don't need a very accurate model, just a order of magnitude one, to see if the technology is realistic Well, to a first order, you just count combustion as heat addition, so replacing 1GW of burning fuel with 1GW of lasers doesn't change anything too important thermodynamically. \eta = 1 - \frac{...

Did any of the technical classes you took have a project component? That's a good way to demonstrate aptitude and interest, and a professor might remember you. If you are willing to put off grad school for another year, you could probably get some undergrad research experience or some EE design proj...

If you're okay with physics without math, there's a Berkeley course called Physics for Future Presidents that you might want to check out. The professor is a physicist, so I assume the physics he teaches is correct, but I know he makes several mistakes in the jet/rocket lecture.

Just a quick question for any Teutonic xkcdians: do German (university) classrooms commonly have sinks? If so, what are they used for? I ask because, in class today, my German professor (he's from Germany; he doesn't teach German) bemoaned the lack of sinks in American classrooms and I'm not sure why.

The celsius scale is quite natural, I think, because the freezing and boiling of water are two very common and very important natural phenomena. Noone ever cares about the difference between -1F and +1F. But the difference between -1°C and +1°C, that is the difference between being well fed in the ...

I have a related question. I took a test the other day which had a time limit, but you could start the test at pretty much any point in the day. You signed in at the start and signed out at the end. Apparently, another student made an honest mistake and took an extra 30 minutes on the test. How woul...

To throw my own 2c in, a fair number of the engineering majors I knew at community college took one or more welding courses on the principle that it's a nice backup skill to have. To ask about another angle here, what sort of technical credentials are good "next steps" after a bachelor's ...

And I guess there's no very sensible way to use air as your fuel source even if you have craploads of electricity? You don't need a fuel source, you need reaction mass. The most straightforward way to do this would be a propeller. More outlandish would be a turbojet or ramjet with the combustor rep...

You could have her use an arcjet rocket . Basically, you use electric heating to flash the water to steam, and direct the steam backwards to generate thrust. Alternately, use a high-voltage arc to ionize the water, and use a strong electric field to accelerate the ions backwards. Note that either of...

Jack Horner is positing that activating a whole bunch of chicken genes will create a dinosaur. So, what I'm referring to is No, he's positing that modifying a chicken will create a dinosaur. Activating deactivated genes (and I wager, silencing active genes) are just one of the tools he plans on usi...

Making a dinosaur from a chicken in the way Horner proposes , also conveniently located in the title of this thread. So what are these 'million things that haven't gone right'? I never wrote the text in your quote, and it is not an accurate paraphrase. For Horner's task to be possible, a million th...

Care to respond to the remaining majority of my post, where I point out that for Horner to succeed, a million little things have to have gone exactly right, and that we know that at least one of those things has not gone exactly right?

What is curious to me is that the article has stated that a single gene has been identified which when activated, causes tooth growth in the beaks of birds, is present and activated in reptiles, and is present but inactivated in birds. Scientists have experimentally activated the gene in birds and ...

A net angular momentum of zero should still resist the change a dainbramage pointed out. No, it won't. Imagine one of those bicycle-wheel-on-handles things that are used for physics class demonstrations. They resist torques because they move at angle perpendicular to applied torque (and also perpen...

how much to return perfectly on the origin? I see no feasible way to do this without absolute position feedback. As for the rest of the question, how advanced is your background in dynamics and in controls? If you have taken a class or two, you should be able to make a model of 1-D lateral motion g...

To continue the appliances analogy, I have strong opinions about what functionality I want in a blender for my own personal use, but I apply those strong opinions by being discriminating about the blender I use. I might go so far as to tell someone responsible for engineering the blender's parts ab...

Ship generating a wavey pattern behind its bow wave. I am not sure why ships sometimes cause this wavey pattern, while supersonic aircraft only generate a "bow wave" without a wavey pattern behind it. I think it's because gravity and surface tension waves in liquids are dispersive, while ...